Exe (pronounce ‘ex’ in English) is an Anglo-Spanish distro, supporting English, Spanish, and American English. No hardware requirements are given, but I’d say that it would run in 256MB. It’s one of the few distros that will still fit on a CD. The installer is very simple and fast, and uses Gparted. It does not offer encryption, however.

Both Trinity and LXDE are installed, which leads to a rather confusing menu. The default programs include Abiword, Gnumeric, Gimp, Iceweasel, Icedove, Konversation, Amarok, Kaffeine, and Audacity. All ran without warnings from the CLI. Media codecs were installed, as was Gnash for Flash content in Iceweasel, and they all worked. The Debian repositories are used, giving an enormous amount of software.

A few things had to be done from the command line or by editing scripts, like enabling my USB speakers and even mounting other partitions on the hard disk. Konsole kept reverting to white on transparent as fast as I set it to black on white, so I just used LXDE’s terminal.

In a world full of Gnome-using Ubuntu derivatives, it’s nice to see something different. The only other distro defaulting to Trinity is Porteus and that’s bleeding-edge while Exe is stable. If you want stable software, like Debian, and feel that KDE has become bloatware, then Exe may be just what you’re looking for.